Regain Your Training Focus: Ask Yourself This

Charles is here on a weekly basis to help you cut through the B.S. and get some real perspective regarding health and training. Please post feedback or questions to Charles directly in the comments below this article.

Here’s a fundamental question to ask yourself whenever you’re trying to improve your results, but aren’t sure where you should focus your efforts. In my experience, most people can answer this question pretty accurately:

“Is the problem that I don’t know what to do, or is it that I do know what to do, but I’m not doing it?”

Train Consistently and Train Hard

When it comes to fitness-related issues, I’d speculate that most people are not limited by their knowledge, but rather by their ability or willingness to apply that knowledge.

Case in point - fat loss. I think most people understand instinctively that if they eat less food, they’ll lose weight. Perhaps focusing on additional details like food quality and meal timing might improve the process a bit, but most of us know eating less will result in weight loss. This begs the question: are most fat people fat because they don’t know the best types of carbs to eat, or because they simply eat too much?

Training follows similar trends. Many of us spin our mental wheels debating the relative merits of training three versus four days per week, or what type of periodization is best. Meanwhile, all around us there are examples of highly successful athletes whose training regimes are markedly dissimilar. What these great athletes have in common is that they all train consistently, and they all train hard.

Do you have a different take on this? If so I’d love to discuss it with you in the comment section below. Let me hear your thoughts.

This Week’s Training

Volume: 37,874 Pounds (Last Week’s Volume: 41,395 Pounds)

Significant Performances:

Squat: 375x1

Bench Press: 255x1

As I get down to the wire here in the final month before competition, everything has become more and more specific. I have little time and energy for assistance lifts, as you can see below.

This week I squatted 375 with perhaps 10-15 pounds of margin, benched 255 and narrowly missed 260, and pulled 445 - which was to be expected after pulling 500 the previous week.

My only concern at this point is that I’ve had to really reduce the frequency and volume of my lower-body work due to knee pain. I hope the base I’ve developed will hold me until November 21.